LaTeX for Secretaries

Life is not fair, is it? You learned how
to use Microsoft Word or Corel WordPerfect, only to find yourself
at a job where your boss says you must use LaTeX. What is this
thing? Can it be used for anything practical, like writing letters,
memos, reports, sending faxes or printing price lists? These are
some of the first questions that come to mind when you start using
it. Fortunately, with LaTeX, it is just as easy to typeset a
1,000-page book filled with mathematical formulae as it is to
prepare a short letter or a price list. These kinds of real-world
office applications are what we are going to discuss below.

Not a Word Processor

Probably the most common misconception about LaTeX is
thinking of it as some kind of text editor or word processor. It is
neither of those tools. Let me explain. When you start Word or
WordPerfect in Microsoft Windows or on a Macintosh, it opens a
window, displaying buttons, menus and a white space where what you
type shows up immediately on-screen and can be edited at will. To
display or print documents, word processors use an “engine” of
some sort that changes simple keystrokes into nice-looking type
according to your choice of font and style. LaTeX can be thought of
as such an engine, reading plaintext files on one end and changing
them into professional-looking documents and saving in its own
format called DVI on the other end.

Although LaTeX is only a pure
typesetting system (it is not a visual DTP package like Microsoft
Publisher, Adobe PageMaker or QuarkXPress) and the documents you
process must be created using a plaintext editor, the quality of
the documents generated in LaTeX are often much superior to Word's
own efforts. However, learning to typeset documents in the former
might be harder at first than doing it in the latter because of the
need to manually add control commands to the text, which some
people find confusing. You might think of it as an unnecessary
burden, but you should remember that in reality, all word
processors and text editors add control commands to the text you
type—they just don't make them visible to us.

Typing Your First Letter

The best way to learn LaTeX is by example, so log in to your
system (in case you do not know what logging
in means, try some beginner Linux books) and type the
following command:

emacs businessletter.latex

File extensions are optional and could be just about anything
you like, although using .latex or .tex is good practice, as it
makes documents easier to find.

After pressing the ENTER (or
RETURN) key, you should see Emacs in all its
glory—two toolbars and an empty space waiting to be filled with
text. The \ character marks the beginning of LaTeX commands, so
remember to put it in as well, and do not get confused by a
\ showing up from time to time in the rightmost
column of the Emacs window—it's there to show you that a
particular line of text is longer than the width of the window and
has been wrapped. Let's type in the lines shown in Listing
1.

To save what you have just typed in, press the
CTRL-X and S keys. You should
see a message at the bottom of the window saying
Wrote .../businessletter.latex to inform
you that your document has just been saved. If you accidentally
press the wrong keys and Emacs starts complaining and beeping at
you, pressing CTRL-G will almost always get you
out of trouble.

Basic LaTeX Commands

As you can see, the example letter is sprinkled with many
strange commands and curly brackets. Besides making a document less
readable, they tell LaTeX how to format it. Unfortunately, you will
need to learn at least a few of them. While you read the following
paragraphs, refer to Listing 1 to see how each command is used in
practice.

First comes the obligatory
\documentclass[...]{...} command, which is not
as scary as it looks and is just an obscure way of telling LaTeX
what kind of document you are trying to print. It could be one of
the following: article, book,
letter, report and
slides. Whatever you choose, put the appropriate
word between curly braces.

The square brackets surround more specific options used to
set the size of paper (available sizes include
a4paper, a5paper,
b5paper, letterpaper,
legalpaper and
executivepaper).

Additional information that can go there includes page
orientation (landscape, useful for printing
presentation slides, or portrait), main font
size (e.g., 10pt, 12pt, etc.)
and many others.

The \frenchspacing command solves some of
the typesetting problems related to setting the amount of space
between a full stop and the next word after abbreviations like
Ms. or at the end of a sentence. I suggest you
always put it somewhere at the beginning of a file, perhaps just
after the \documentclass[...]{...} command.
Purists will surely complain about this advice, but using
\frenchspacing will automatically make documents
look better without causing you to worry how it happened. However,
if you want to be “politically correct”, always put a
~ between an abbreviated word ending with a full
stop and the next letter, number or word, e.g.,
Ms.~Green instead of just typing Ms.
Green.

After setting those options, you will need to specify the
sender's address with the \address{...} command;
every line should be separated by \\--this
method is used in many other commands as well. If you are using
official company letterhead, you may leave this out.

LaTeX automatically puts the current date into a letter, but
you can use the \date{...} command to specify a
different one.

The signature text should go into the
\signature{...} command.

To let the program know where your letter begins, use the
\begin{document} and
\begin{letter} commands. Just after the latter,
insert the recipient's address in curly brackets. Then, begin the
greeting with the \opening{...} command and
start writing your letter. Write as much or as little as you need,
separating each paragraph with a blank line (you will need to press
the ENTER key twice).

At the end of your letter, use the
\closing{...} command and, if needed, add the
\cc{...} for “copies to:”,
\encl{...} for “enclosed items:” and
\ps{...} for PostScript.

You should end a letter file with the following commands:
\end{letter} and
\end{document}. That's it. You can save it as
described above.

There is one trick which you can use to save yourself a bit
of work when you need to type several letters. It is possible to
begin another letter in the same file, just put the
\begin{letter}{...} and the other commands
mentioned above between the \end{letter} and the
\end{document} commands. LaTeX will
automatically use the signature, date and sender's address you
specified at the beginning of a file (that's why you had to put
your signature text at the top of the file).

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